Date: Sunday, March 3rd, 2013 14:34 (UTC)
crowdog66: (brigid stained glass)
From: [personal profile] crowdog66
Fandom size never affects my writing, or at least if it does I'm not conscious of it. :) A good story is a good story, period.

Today's excerpt is from "Riding the Dragon", a multi-chapter Avengers/Knight Rider crossover fic that I just finished this week. WARNING: Rated R for profanity.

***************************************************

Alcohol for the purposes of intoxication was a forbidden substance on the Helicarrier, as Tony himself had pointed out, but when the man in charge pulls out a bottle and starts pouring rounds… well, a smart soldier shuts up and drinks. So Steve did, and it wasn't like Tony Stark had ever given a flying damn about regulations anyway.

Tony put the whiskey away like a man dying of thirst, and it hit his exhausted merely human body like a Mac truck. When he started slurring savage sentence fragments about how it should have been him and how he was going to find the people responsible for the Dragon and tear their throats out with his teeth, Steve just nodded and kept matching him drink for drink, while Fury kept pouring and Bruce watched with silent compassion. The Director's strategy wasn't hard to figure out: keep Tony drinking until he collapsed, then haul him off to bed and hope he'd sleep off the worst of both the intoxication and the initial shock, waking up some span of hours later in serious pain but with a clearer head. It was a line of attack Steve had seen work numerous times before, although he'd never had the occasion to make use of it personally.

But for such a small man Tony had a wicked tolerance for alcohol — and evidently balls the size of church bells, because he was on his seventh glass and still upright when he looked Fury in the eyes with naked belligerence and hissed: "An' you let him go… you — fuckin' let him go!"

Fury's response was immediate and unruffled: "If I hadn't, none of us would be sitting here talking about this. Besides, you should know better than anyone how good he was at following orders he didn't like."

"Fucking straight," Tony muttered, and took half his glass in one swallow before a fond smile suddenly curved his full lips and lit up his eyes. "God! If he thought you were full of shit, he'd just —" And just as suddenly the light went pitch-black with a moan. "Oh. Oh, God — I could've stopped him! If I hadn't…"

"No, Tony. You couldn't." Bruce spoke for the first time, his voice like a warm hand extended to clasp a shoulder hunched in agony. "He didn't tell you what he was going to do. You didn't know —"

Tony slammed his open hand down on the tabletop, his eyes blazing. "I should've known!" he shouted, eyes blazing with his self-directed rage. "He was KITT, I knew him, I knew what he was capable of! All the pieces were there, but I —" In the blink of an eye, rage became loathing. "He's dead because I wasn't fucking fast enough. Because I didn't see what was right in front of my nose. Because I was too busy puking my guts out to pay attention while he died."

"That's not fair," Steve said, and when Tony turned an incredulous glare and rising eyebrows in his direction he continued firmly: "When you realized what was going on you tried to stop him. It was the Other Guy who held you back and saved your life — which was what KITT would have wanted. I think he deliberately kept you in the dark because he didn't want you to become another casualty. He knew you too, and he knew what you were likely to do — and he wanted you to live."

"Fuck you," Tony said in a tone almost of awe. "You didn't know him. You didn't even like him."
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